Following a comment made on this site by a friend of mine who many years ago was a student in several of my classes, I’ll be screening a part of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” during the last meeting of my “City” course. We’ll watch Mr Badii driving around the dusty, industrial outskirts of Tehran, looking for someone who will bury him after his suicide, or maybe even save him. For those wondering about the title, here’s a summary from this site:

During Badii’s conversation with the taxidermist–which Kiarostami cuts to in medias res, eliding how they met and how their conversation began–it’s the taxidermist who does most of the talking, explaining how close he came to suicide himself back in 1960, after a fight with his wife. Deciding to hang himself, he carried a rope to a mulberry-tree plantation, but before he could complete the deed he decided to taste a mulberry, then a second and a third. He looked at the scenery, heard the voices of children, and decided to live. A little later he asks Badii, “Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?”

In his comment, my friend has asked whether I’ll describe the changes in my teaching since the days when he was my student. (How long ago was it that I first provoked him in class? Thirteen years? Fourteen?) In lieu of anything I could say here myself, let me provide a pedagogical note provided by Kiarostami himself:

I think a good film is one that has a lasting power, and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don’t like the film in which the film-makers take the audience hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater.

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